Category Archives: Mozilla events

At the Mozilla Summit, Mitchell and Mark talked about education as one of the pillars that underlies our mission. To paraphrase Mark,

“We need to make sure that the whole of the web understands what the web can do for them so they can use it to make their lives better.”

One way we do this is through Webmaker. Right there on webmaker.org it says, we’re dedicated to teaching web literacy. The big Webmaker projects right now (Thimble, X-Ray Goggles, Popcorn) are mainly focused on the “building” literacy. I think the other literacies – exploring and connecting – are also extremely important and possibly relevant to a wider group of people as they include the very basic skills of using a browser (navigation, search, security, privacy, sharing and collaborating).

I also think we have a great opportunity to address exploring and connecting, not only as Webmaker projects, but built right into our products and the experiences that surround them. For example, one of the findings of our North American user type study was that simplified, integrated (in the browser as opposed to the help site), help and support would be a direct thing we could do to help Evergreens and Busy Bees. And, taken together, Evergreens and Busy Bees (plus hybrids that include these types) are our largest group accounting for about 36% of users.

So what would it look like to build user education into everything we do? Well, this new update experience is one example. It might also look like Facebook posts, newsletters, search results, installation dialogs or the product documentation on mozilla.org. This year I’ll begin to work full-time on developing and testing approaches. As a former teacher, the exciting part for me will be what we learn from people. As Mitchell says in the video above,

“Most good teachers will tell you that if you try to teach, you end up learning.”

David and I went to Mozcamp Asia in Kuala Lumpur back in November. It was fantastic and afterwards we got to spend a day seeing some of the sights. These are few moments from the trip, including a failed attempt at creating a special What’s Up With SUMO introduction (like this one).